Monday, May 9 at 1pm

Guggenheim Museum

New Media Theater

1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128

Free with museum admission (Adults $15, Students/Seniors $10)

UntitledNeïl Beloufa, 2010, 15 minsUntitled is an investigation into an anecdote the artist heard about a house near Algiers: that it was abandoned by its wealthy owners during the political unrest in the 1990s and occupied by a terrorist group. The idyllic landscape we are shown is in fact a series of full-scale inkjet prints, which the artist photographed and used to wallpaper a life-size model of the house for his film set. Actors playing the landlord of the house, the gardener and the neighbors give conflicting accounts of what the terrorists had done there, how they lived, how they ate. More importantly, they question why the group chose to live in a house with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on all sides. This re-imagined scene is typical of Beloufa’s exploration of the hazy shades of narrative, make-believe and truth that underpin the representations of real-world events.

Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the end of an argument)/Speaking for oneself… Speaking for others…Jayce Salloum & Elia Suleiman, 1990, 40 minsIntroduction to the end of an argument is a highly kinetic tableaux of uprooted sights and sounds that works to expose the racial imaginary of mass media images. With snippets from feature films such as Exodus, Lawrence of Arabia, Black Sunday, and The Little Drummer Girl, as well as network news programs, the filmmakers have constructed an oddly wry narrative that mimes the history of Middle East politics. Twenty-six years and many media later, the film is simultaneously an artefact of 1980s-era critique and a refracted mirror on our current reality.
View artist’s statement on Gulf Labor Coalition